From the beginning, The St. Martin’s Handbook has been informed by research on student writing. The late Robert J. Connors and I first began work on The St. Martin’s Handbook in 1983, when we realized that most college handbooks were based on research into student writing conducted almost fifty years earlier. Our own historical studies had convinced us that student writing and what teachers think of as “good” writing change over time, so we began by gathering a nationwide sample of more than twenty-one thousand marked student essays and carefully analyzing a stratified sample to identify the twenty surface errors most characteristic of contemporary student writing.

Our analysis of these student essays revealed the twenty errors that most troubled students and teachers in the 1980s (spelling was by far the most prevalent error then) as well as the organizational and other global issues of greatest concern to teachers. Our findings on the twenty most common errors led to sections in The St. Martin’s Handbook that attempt to put error in its place, presenting the conventions of writing as rhetorical choices a writer must make rather than as a series of rules that writers must obey.

Every subsequent edition of The St. Martin’s Handbook has been informed by research, from a national survey of student writers on how they are using technology, to a series of intensive interviews with students and focus group sessions with first-year writing instructors, to a nationwide study for which Karen Lunsford and I replicated the research Connors and I did twenty-five years ago. Our “‘Mistakes Are a Fact of Life’: A National Comparative Study” appeared in the June 2008 issue of College Composition and Communication. In sum, this study found that students are writing much longer essays than they were twenty-five years ago; that they are tackling more cognitively demanding topics and assignments, usually focusing on argument; and that the ratio of errors per one hundred words has not gone up but has remained almost constant during the last one hundred years (according to every national study we could find). While students are not making more mistakes, however, we found that they are making different ones—especially having to do with the use of and documentation of sources. And in an ironic note, we found that while spelling errors have decreased dramatically with the use of spell checkers, the number of “wrong word” mistakes has risen—partly because of spell checkers suggesting that wrong word! Finally, in the midst of national hand-wringing over the damage texting, chatting, and blogging are doing to writing, our study showed that students in first-year writing classes, at least, know perfectly well when to write “LOL” or “GTG” or a host of other shortcuts and when such Internet lingo is inappropriate for their audience, purpose, and context. (You can find articles detailing my research with Bob Connors and with Karen Lunsford in From Theory to Practice: A Selection of Essays by Andrea A. Lunsford, available free from Bedford/St. Martin’s.)

These findings are borne out by a five-year longitudinal study of both in-class and out-of-class writing (in any medium or genre) I have conducted, analyzing the writing of 189 writers. Again I saw longer pieces of writing and more analytical topics along with extracurricular writing of all kinds, from blog postings and emails to multimedia presentations and even a three-hour “hip-hopera.” These student writers were aware of themselves as writers and rhetors, conscious that they could reach worldwide audiences at the click of a mouse; intrigued by new concepts of textual ownership and knowledge production brought about by collaborative programs like Google Docs and file sharing of all kinds; and convinced that good writing is, as they told me over and over, “writing that makes something happen in the world.” They see writing, then, as active and performative, as something that gets up off the page or screen and marches out into the world to do some good. In addition, they report that their best breakthroughs in terms of writing development tend to occur during what researcher Paul Rogers calls “dialogic interaction.” That is, they learned most and best from interactions with knowledgeable others, whether peers, parents, or instructors—in the kind of give-and-take during which they could talk through ideas and get an immediate response.

In my most recent research project, I surveyed writing teachers across the country, asking them whether they gave multimodal writing assignments and, if so, what they were like. Some 80 percent of the teachers surveyed said that they do give multimodal assignments, and they sent in a dizzying array of such projects, from blogs to vlogs and everything in between: wikis, illustrated storybooks, podcasts and other audio essays, video, film, Twitter contests, animated smartphone mini-lessons, “pitch” proposals for new apps, PechaKuchas, and digital research projects, to name just a few. So while traditional academic print texts are probably still the most common assignment across the disciplines on college campuses today, that scene is rapidly changing.

So today, nearly thirty years after I started working on The St. Martin’s Handbook, I am more optimistic about students and student writing than ever. That optimism and the findings of my most recent research inform this eighth edition of the text. As always, this book seeks to serve students as a ready reference that will help them make appropriate grammatical, syntactical, and rhetorical choices. Beyond this immediate goal, though, I hope to guide students in understanding and experiencing for themselves the multiple ways in which truly good writing always means more than just following any set of rules. Truly good writing, as the students in the longitudinal study of writing insisted, means applying those rules in specific rhetorical situations for specific purposes and with specific audiences in ways that will bring readers and writers, teachers and students, to spirited conversation as well as to mutual understanding and respect.